A Curious Beginning (and 7 more) by Deanna Raybourn

[lightreads]

A curious Beginning plus seven more books

3/5. Series of historical mysteries with a “slow burn” het romance subplot, featuring a naturalist and her partner in many senses.

I’m about to complain about these, but I feel in fairness I should also point out that I did read eight of them. They’re comfortable popcorn books with a growing cast of colorful secondary characters and a variety of mystery/suspense plots.

But they’re also pretty annoying. Veronica, our protagonist, has a case of not-like-other-girls-itis so bad, it really ought to be fatal. These books are just heavily overclocked in general; Raybourn has zero chill about anything ever, including some very delicate emotional things. Also, this is one of those “slow burns” that I don’t think earns the name. Sure it takes them like five books to hook up, but that’s more annoying than tantalizing when they got fake married and started having whoops-we-almost-kissed moments in the first hundred pages of the first book. It’s not slow burn, it’s just here’s a fire but we’re not going to do anything about it for a series of more or less stupid or arbitrary reasons for an annoying length of time.

I did read eight, though. Fun, quippy, frequently annoying, generally entertaining.

Content notes: Murder of all sorts, a lot of stuff that is blurring together now

Comments

[nuit_belle]

Long-time lurker, first-time commenter. I've really enjoyed reading your reviews, and the observation about the latest Murderbot ("the last third of Network Effect lopped off and published three years late") summed the problem up so perfectly!

Yeah, Raybourn has sadly stopped being an auto-buy for me and become a "borrow from the library" instead. I feel like she's always treading the same ground (this is a trend I'm seeing more and more in mysteries, like the TE Kinsey Lady Hardcastle books, which are generally a fun read but getting a bit repetitive).

I did enjoy Raybourn's contemporary book, Killers of a Certain Age (currently pondering whether I enjoyed it enough to buy the discounted ebook, after getting a bookbub email). I thought the use of 1st person present tense for the current-day events & 3rd person past tense for the flashbacks was well done. I imagine that Hollywood's dislike of older women is why it hasn't been optioned because it would be a great movie/limited series.


For mysteries, you might like:
Claudia Gray (who used to be active in fandom under a pen name) has a Jane Austen mystery series.
Allison Montclair -- post-WWII England, two women (an ex-spy and a widowed aristocrat) run a matchmaking bureau but keep on getting involved in (and solving) murders


Have you read Andrea K Host/Karan K Anders? I enjoyed the Touchstone trilogy and short novellas (Australian teen accidentally winds up in another world and ends up helping their X-men esque defenders), and her romance duology (The Book of First / Four Kings, under the Anders pen name) was a highlight for me, unlike any other poly romance I've read.

[lightreads]

Hi! and thanks for the recs. I'm not familiar with any of those. I keep telling people I'm not a mystery reader, but evidence suggests this is not actually true. It's more that I want to binge a long, good mystery series a few times a year, and when it's good, there's nothing like it. Will add these to my list.